The present invention relates to the field of breast pumps and more particularly to an adapter for allowing existing breast pumps to fill infant nursers having disposable liners.
The combination of an increased awareness of the health benefits of breast-feeding an infant and the increased number of women returning to the work force shortly after giving birth has led to an increased use of breast pumps for maintaining a supply of breast milk for the infant when the mother is unavailable. Banks of donors' breast milk have also been established to nourish needy infants. A wide variety of types of breast pumps is available, both manual and electrically operated. The most effective breast pumps provide alternating positive and negative pressure at 45 to 60 cycles per minute to simulate the sucking action of the infant. Most such pumps provide a receptacle for temporarily receiving the extracted milk. The milk is then transferred to the baby bottle or to a freezer container for freezing and long term storage.
Infant nursers, such as those manufactured and sold under the PLAYTEX trademark, consisting of a disposable polyethylene plastic liner fitted inside a rigid, reusable plastic shell, have become very popular due the convenience and added cleanliness and safety which comes from not having to wash and reuse the baby's bottle. Disposable bags of a nylon/polyethylene laminate have also been developed to reduce the loss of nutrients when the milk is stored over a long period of time. Where the mother wishes to utilize a nurser to feed her own breast milk to her child, it has been necessary for the mother to express the milk by hand into the disposable liner or use a breast pump and transfer the extracted milk by hand from the pump container to the nurser. Both procedures are time-consuming, messy and unsanitary.
One breast pump known to the inventor, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,705,504, issued Nov. 10, 1987 to Viers, uses a disposable, removable bag to receive the pumped milk, but this design involves using a squeezable rubber bulb to create the negative pumping pressure, and the disposable bag is held onto the rubber bulb by an elastic band. The bag has no rigid support. Consequently this pump is difficult and inefficient to use and still requires that the user transfer the filled bag of milk to the nurser or some other dispenser.
There is therefore a need for an effective adapter which allows existing breast pumps to be used to fill infant nursers directly.